Another Rainy Day

Another rainy day. I must visit the clinic tomorrow. It’s been two days since I ran out of Cymbalta, and the familiar funny electric sensation is coming back. Perhaps with connection with this, my appetite increased as Cymbalta is known to suppress it.

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The Singlish debate continues and seems endless. As a non-Singaporean from an Asian country who learned English as a foreign language, I am quite tired of reading about it. Even though Singapore’s “unique English” can be enchanting and amusing in some cases, do not dumb down the language, for the sake of easy communication, period. With only a crude form of a language, how could you express, spoken or written, subtle feelings required for a decent human life. I believe that I do not have to elaborate about funny grammar and accent, as many people are aware of them.

Suppose that history dictated Singapore to adapt, say, Italian as an official language instead of English. Its rules are much more complicated than those of English, with male, female and neutral nouns, etc. Communications among citizens of different native languages would be all but impossible. Dear Singaporeans, you are very lucky to have English as one of your official languages. Treasure it. Don’t trash it.

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朝日新聞から：「パレスチナ自治区ガザを制圧したイスラム過激派ハマスは１５日夜、戦闘員が覆面を着けるのを禁止した。ガザでは黒覆面姿の集団が自動小銃を構えて戦闘する場面がおなじみになっていた」

「おなじみになっていた」って……。「テレビでおなじみ」じゃないんだから。ふざけてる。

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Since Thursday, I’ve been feeling I lost three important people, and home with them. Well, I had lost home when I left my Osaka apartment to leave for Singapore. (“Well, I’ve rather burned my boats, haven’t I?”) However, that was by my own action and I was quite contented then. Things are different this time because I never expected anything like this to happen; one: guilty, two: innocent and three: irrational. In an environment where casualness is not allowed and there is no spontaneous smile, they are nonetheless important by blood and/or by law. I’ve been dancing quietly with those three people while maintaining a delicate distance from all of them. Now by a careless, sinful and simply stupid act, the dance is no more. I can’t contact any of them because I don’t know how. More than ever, I hesitate to answer international calls. The ultimate sacrifice on my part might awaken them out of this stupidity. But I shouldn’t count on it. The guilty would feel guiltier, the innocent would feel guilty and the irrational would continue to be irrational. This family has been collapsing for so many years. And now is this the final nail to the coffin? (I believe that there seem a few other people who need my ultimate sacrifice to understand what has been happening to me. But this is another story.)

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Study for the test on Tuesday. There is not much I can do to prepare for it… The only thing I can do seems to read more and more deeply.